This week we considered rather a complicated, but crucial topic, which is methodological issues in cultural psychology. During the group discussion we established that methodological issues should vary from culture to culture, depending on how people from particular culture are accustomed to transmitting and sharing knowledge.
It was an eye-opening insight for me, because I held a view that science is supposed to be universal. However, turns out, what makes it more reliable is paying attention to nuances and differences in perception of people. These differences in perception create the problem of translation group effects. As someone who speaks several languages, I can relate to this problem. Even though I tend to know the correct linguistic translation of words, it is hard to explain the exact meaning of a word without its cultural context. Additionally, there might be different words of varying intensity for the single behavior in one language, while in another you might find only one word which does not cover experience’s different measures. Because of this, answers on self-report scales can change accordingly.
Another problem which made me reconsider my views is a typicality approach. Research is based on the notion that there is a typical representative of certain culture with certain age, education and socio-economic characteristics. This approach would be reasonable if only there weren’t more cultures within one culture – even within one culture people can have different experiences, education and views. And by establishing a typical representative, one might give privilege to certain group while discriminating against another. For example, I don’t seem to find a definition of a “typical Kazakh person”, and this complexity exists for a country with only 20 million people. I don’t imagine how possibly people come up with a typical sample for cultures with much more population.
Placing very specific type of people in the center of research made me think of Feminism movement, where the earlier waves were concentrated on only white women with high socio-economic status. Women advocated for white women working high paid jobs and getting a fair wage, while there were still ethnic minority women who couldn’t afford basic hygienic products. The question arises: was it really feminism or was it only white feminism? In a same way, while research tries to discover socially important topics, it often does so through intentionally or unintentionally excluding certain types of people.
In conclusion, there are countless methodological nuances which should be considered while conducting research in cultural psychology. It seems to me that the most optimal solutions for now is to be aware of culture as much as possible and utilizing the just minimal difference approach. This approach can help to minimize confounding factors and bring more clarity into research.
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